What should fiscal councils do?

Transcription

1 What should fiscal councils do? Lars Calmfors, Stockholm University and Swedish Fiscal Policy Council Simon Wren-Lewis, Oxford University 11 March We are grateful for helpful comments from Jens Clausen, Lars Jonung, Philip Lane and Robert Östlind, for research assistance from Georg Marthin, and for secretarial assistance from Astrid Wåke.

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3 1 1. Introduction The international financial crisis which erupted in the autumn of 2008 gradually changed into fiscal crises in a number of countries. While this partly reflects the impact of the recession, there is a fear that it might also mark a return to an earlier trend. The period from the early 1970s up to the mid 1990 s was characterised by rapidly increasing government debt in most OECD economies. It then became customary to talk about fiscal policy being subject to deficit bias. This helped change attitudes to fiscal policy. Discretionary policy fell into disrepute. Instead fiscal rules designed to discipline policy makers were emphasised. At the EU level, the stability pact imposed ceilings on both deficits and debt as well as medium-term budget objectives. Several countries, such as the UK and Sweden, also introduced national fiscal rules. The recent explosion in government debt suggests that the rules approach was not sufficient. One reason is that rules were not observed (Greece), another that, when deficit ceilings were respected, fiscal outcomes lay so close to them that there was no margin for contingencies (Portugal, France and the UK). In some countries there was an overoptimism about the sustainability of booms, such that when they came to an end, huge budget deteriorations resulted (Ireland, Spain and the UK). These fiscal problems have led to a search for new ways of ensuring fiscal discipline. An idea that has received widespread attention is the establishment of independent fiscal institutions. Such institutions have recently been advocated by, for example, IMF staff (Annett et al., 2005; Kumar and Ter-Minassian, 2007), the OECD (in a number of Economic Surveys), the ECB (2010) and the European Commission (2010a,b). EU finance ministers agreed in the van Rompuy Task Force (2010) to work out European standards for fiscal councils tasked with providing independent analysis, assessments and forecasts related to domestic fiscal policy matters. The recent interest in independent fiscal institutions was stimulated by a series of academic proposals starting in the mid 1990 s. 1 The common motive is a desire to adapt the good experiences of independent central banking to the fiscal sphere. The proposals are of two types: some envisage delegation of actual fiscal policy decisions, others propose delegation of forecasting, analysis, evaluation and advising. 1 See, for example, von Hagen and Harden (1994), Blinder (1997), Wyplosz (2002, 2005), Calmfors (2003, 2005, 2010b), Wren-Lewis (1996, 2003) and Kirsanova et al. (2007). Debrun et al. (2009) provides a survey of proposals.

4 2 Independent institutions with the latter fiscal watchdog function have existed for a long time in some countries. They include the Central Planning Bureau in the Netherlands, the Economic Council in Denmark, the Congressional Budget Office in the US and the High Council of Finance in Belgium. Recently, similar institutions have been created in Sweden, Hungary, Canada, Slovenia and the UK. They are often labelled fiscal councils. New fiscal councils are being considered in a number of countries, including Ireland, Portugal and Slovakia. We analyse what role fiscal watchdogs can play. Should they do forecasting or only evaluate the government s forecasts? Should they just undertake positive analysis or also give normative recommendations? Should they be complements to fiscal rules, helping to monitor them, or substitutes, allowing a more discretionary policy approach? Should fiscal watchdogs only evaluate the extent to which intermediate, medium-term fiscal objectives are attained or should they also analyse the appropriateness of these objectives? Should the remit be confined to fiscal policy or can it be broadened to other policy areas as well? How should independence from the political system be guaranteed? When is the establishment of a fiscal council time consistent, i.e. under what circumstances is a council likely to survive as an independent agent in the political policy-making process? We discuss these issues theoretically and analyse the experiences of existing councils. Section 2 briefly reviews the development of government deficits and debts. To have a benchmark for the subsequent analysis, Section 3 discusses optimal debt policy. Section 4 surveys various explanations of deficit bias and their implications for fiscal councils. Section 5 discusses how they can be set up in practice. Section 6 surveys how existing councils function. This survey is complemented by two case studies in Section 7: of the Swedish Fiscal Policy Council and of the Office for Budget Responsibility in the UK. Section 8 concludes. 2. Trends in government debt The current pace of increase in government debt is unprecedented in most countries. This is illustrated in Figures 1 and 2. Figure 1 shows that consolidated gross debt in the OECD area increased from 73 to 97 per cent of GDP between 2007 and Figure 2 shows developments in the euro area, Japan and the US. The recent sharp rise in government debt has resulted from a combination of automatic stabilisers being allowed to work in the recession, discretionary action to stimulate the economy and support to the financial sector in some countries. For the OECD area as a whole,

5 3 the last years' increase in government debt stands in contrast to a stable or falling debt-to- GDP ratio in the preceding decade. Figure 1 General government gross debt (OECD), per cent of GDP Consolidated gross debt Gross debt Net debt Note: Gross debt is the sum of all financial liabilities in the general government sector without any netting between different parts of the sector. Consolidated gross debt is total debt in the general government sector after internal claims and liabilities in the sector have been netted out. Net debt is the general government sector s gross financial debt minus its financial assets. Source: OECD Economic Outlook November 2009 and European Parliament. Figure 2 General government consolidated gross debt (Euro area, Japan and US), per cent of GDP Euro area (EURO 12) Japan US Note: Euro area includes West-Germany up until Source: European Parliament.

6 4 Looking further back, the secular rise in the ratio of government debt to GDP between the mid 1970s and the mid 1990 s stands out. During this period, the gross debt ratio nearly doubled in the OECD, rising from around 40 per cent of GDP to about 75 per cent. These developments gave rise to a large literature on deficit bias, which we summarise in Section Optimal debt policy and the inadequacy of fiscal rules There are two clear reasons for believing that deficit bias is undesirable. First, many governments have established fiscal rules designed to prevent it. Second, deficit bias is not consistent with existing ideas about optimal debt policy. This section begins by elaborating both points. It ends by using ideas about optimal debt policy to suggest why fiscal rules on their own are likely to fail, creating a potential role for fiscal councils Fiscal rules Although studies of the effects of rules on fiscal performance are plagued by problems of interpretation (it may be that fiscally responsible governments signal their determination to exert fiscal discipline through the adoption of fiscal rules), there is some evidence that rules have had a causal effect (for example, European Commission, 2006 and OECD, 2007). But at the same time it is clear that fiscal rules have often been violated. This is probably most evident in the case of the EU's stability pact, agreed in According to it: government budget deficits shall not exceed three per cent of GDP; and consolidated gross government debt shall not exceed 60 per cent of GDP, or if the debt ratio is larger, it shall be approaching the debt limit "at a satisfactory pace". Table 1 summarises the cases where at least one of the two rules was violated (the debt rule has then been interpreted liberally as being followed as soon as the debt ratio falls). What is remarkable is the large number of breaches before the recent crisis erupted in 2008 (44 out of 177 possible cases). This indicates that the rules were not binding Optimal debt policy The starting point for any analysis of optimal debt policy might be the implications of tax smoothing (Barro, 1979). If we could choose our initial debt level, then in a very simple world without public-sector capital we would choose a negative level that could eliminate all distortionary taxation. However, if we instead inherit positive debt, it would be undesirable to eliminate it, because eliminating taxes in the long run would require substantial increases in

8 6 The rise in OECD debt prior to 2008 would only be consistent with random-walk debt if government finances had been hit by an unusual run of bad shocks. There is no reason to believe this to be so. Furthermore, potential qualifications to the random-walk debt result suggest declining, rather than rising, optimal debt (Wren-Lewis, 2011). In particular, if the interest rate exceeds the discount rate, either because of a default premium or because the current generation fails to internalise the welfare of future generations (as in overlappinggenerations models), the benefits of reducing debt exceed the costs in terms of higher shortrun taxes (Erosa and Gervais, 2001). There might also be precautionary motives for keeping debt low, such as the need to use expansionary fiscal policy to compensate for hitting a zero bound for interest rates (Wren-Lewis, 2010), which modify the random walk debt result (Mash, 2010). While deficit bias appears sub-optimal, it may not even be sustainable. Sustainability is a much weaker criterion than optimality: there are many sustainable long-run levels of debt, and many paths towards that long run. An insight on sustainability is given by the European Commission's calculations of the so-called S2 indicator. It measures the annual, permanent budget improvement as a percentage of GDP which is required to meet the government's intertemporal budget constraint (i.e. for it to be able to pay the interest on the outstanding debt) given current tax and expenditure rules as well as projected demographic developments. The calculations imply that the fiscal balance must improve by 7.4 per cent of GDP compared to 2009 on a permanent basis across the EU as a whole (European Commission, 2009) The difficulty with fiscal rules alone Deficit bias appears to represent a significant departure from optimal policy, and may endanger sustainability. But at the same time optimality considerations might make fiscal rules problematic as a sufficient means of controlling deficit bias. While it is fairly easy to overturn the random-walk debt result, the implication that sharp movements in fiscal instruments should be avoided is more robust. This has two implications. First, the optimal approach to any optimal debt target should be slow (Leith and Wren-Lewis, 2000; Marcet and Scott, 2008). Second, it is optimal to largely accommodate shocks to debt in the short run. 3 Government debt should be a short-term buffer rather than a 3 This analysis is also likely to be compatible with using countercyclical fiscal policy when monetary policy is constrained by a zero-interest-rate bound, because the benefits of doing this will probably outweigh the costs of any delay to reaching the optimal debt target.

9 7 target. Simple rules involving ex-post targets for debt or deficits are likely to produce suboptimal policy, which in turn reduces their credibility. One possibility is to see fiscal rules as something to strive for ex ante, but not to achieve ex post. Ex-post evaluation could be done to learn about the risks of not achieving the objective in the future, but it would not require any policy reaction. The problem with such an approach is that the incentives to achieve targets ex ante become weak. Here, clearly a fiscal council could play a role in monitoring that ex-post deviations from ex-ante targets are motivated by economic shocks. Another approach to fiscal rules is to design them in a more complex way, so that they are explicitly contingent on shocks that might hit the economy. Unfortunately the contingent nature of such rules is likely to make them difficult to monitor, and they therefore may on their own be ineffective (Wyplosz 2005; Kirsanova et al., 2007; Debrun et al., 2009). A fiscal council could play a useful role of monitoring complex rules. The conclusion is that fiscal councils could be useful complements to fiscal rules. The appropriate design of such councils, however, is likely to depend on the causes of deficit bias, which is an issue we now turn to. 4. Understanding deficit bias, and the implications for fiscal councils There are a several reasons for deficit bias discussed in the literature, and that therefore could provide a case for independent fiscal institutions. 4 Below we try to isolate the key ingredients that may be involved, although in reality these may be interrelated. 5 We distinguish the following classes of explanation: (i) informational problems; (ii) impatience; (iii) exploitation of future generations; (iv) electoral competition; (v) common-pool problems; and (vi) time inconsistency. In each case, we ask what role a fiscal council might have, and what this might imply for its form Informational problems One class of theories focuses on informational problems. An example is over-optimism about future growth, either by the electorate (who elect a government that reflects this optimism), or by the government relative to the electorate. Over-optimism can create deficit bias because tax revenues will be persistently below expectations. Politicians may overestimate their ability to influence growth, and may pressurise civil servants to produce over-optimistic forecasts. If 4 Deficit bias is in practice closely related to pro-cyclicality. In principle, fiscal policy could be pro-cyclical without exhibiting deficit bias, but in general deficit bias results in large part from a failure to control spending and tax decreases in good times. 5 This extends earlier attempts by, for example, Bertelsmann and Rogoff (2010) and Calmfors (2010b).

10 8 this is the source of deficit bias, then delegating just the forecasting process to an independent agency would be appropriate. Maskin and Tirole (2004) talk about the danger of elected representatives pandering to popular opinion. Although this phrase is often used, it appears paradoxical, as we would normally want governments to reflect public opinion. But a key point about representative democracy is that the electorate normally delegates decision-making to representatives, whose job it is to take good decisions that the individual has neither the time nor the competence to make. In this sense, representative democracy presumes a lack of information on the part of the electorate, and this lack can be exploited. Voters may be unaware of what the true fiscal position is. A government may argue that particular spending increases or tax decreases are affordable within existing fiscal plans, and it may be very difficult to verify this. This ignorance may allow the government to increase its chances of re-election, creating a political business cycle As there is no similar incentive to raise taxes or cut spending, this will lead to deficit bias. Such lack of information might help explain the results in Alesina et al. (1998) that successful fiscal adjustments do not appear to jeopardise government popularity: if voters are made fully aware of the fiscal arithmetic, they may support short-term costs for longer-term gains. Alt and Lassen (2007), Broesens and Wierts (2009) and Lassen (2010) show that budget outcomes are more favourable in countries where fiscal policies were more transparent. If the electorate believe that politicians may spend money on prestigious projects or on particular interest groups, in ways that are hard to monitor, it may put pressure on governments to cut taxes to avoid money being wasted in this way (Alesina et al., 2008; Andersen and Westh Nielsen, 2010). If lack of information is a cause of deficit bias, a clear role a fiscal council could play is to provide better (i.e. unbiased) information. This would increase the probability that any rules to counter deficit bias are respected Impatience Another possible explanation of deficit bias is impatience. This can work at the level of individuals or governments. An example of the former is where agents have hyperbolic discount functions rather than conventional exponential discount functions (Laibson, 1997). This makes individuals impatient in the short term, but more patient over medium- to longterm horizons, implying time-inconsistent preferences. Bertelsmann (2010), and Rogoff and Bertelsmann (2010) apply this idea to explain deficit bias.

11 9 An analogy is that we know we are overweight and should therefore eat less, but when a waiter offers us tempting desserts at a restaurant, we cannot resist. Just as the presence of a partner at the restaurant reminding us how we resolved to eat less can be effective in changing our decision, so a fiscal council may be useful in helping the electorate resist the short-term temptations of tax cuts or additional spending. Governments may not be able to play this role because it may generate short term unpopularity that could lose elections, while a fiscal council does not have the same concern. A more common explanation for why impatience might lead to deficit bias involves governments discounting at a higher rate than the electorate, because individual politicians may lose office in elections. If optimal long-run debt follows a random walk, then a more impatient policymaker may allow debt to explode after an adverse shock to the public finances (Kirsanova et al., 2007). The electorate may not be able to discipline politicians effectively, because elections are fought over a multitude of issues. Fiscal councils could provide an alternative source of political pressure in this case Electoral competition Implicit in the impatient government story is that the electorate is unable to elect a more patient government. A similar story concerns competition between two political parties, but here government preferences are perfectly aligned with those of a section of the electorate. Parties can follow the electorate in having different preferences either over types of public goods or over the size of government. This set-up was originally formalised by Alesina and Tabellini (1990) and Persson and Svensson (1989), and later analysed in a sticky-price model with nominal debt by Leith and Wren-Lewis (2009). In this theory, governments do not fully internalise the cost of debt, because those costs may be borne by an opposing party if the government is not re-elected. In addition, accumulating debt now has the strategic advantage from the point of the current government that it becomes more difficult for other future governments to pursue the interests of their constituencies, as the room for fiscal manoeuvre is reduced. In this framework, each party would show no undue impatience if it could be certain to be in power forever. Here, the apparent impatience entirely reflects the wishes of the section of the electorate that the party in government represents. It is conceivable that parties under a veil of ignorance of who will govern in the future (or simply realising that they are likely to alternate in government) could agree on a fiscal rule to counter deficit bias arising from electoral competition. However, once in power a party has

12 10 an incentive to violate the rule. A fiscal council, with the task of acting as a guardian of the rule, might act as a countervailing force by raising the reputation cost for politicians of reneging on the rule Common-pool theory As public projects or tax cuts may favour small groups, those groups lobby for these with insufficient regard to the full budgetary costs now as well as in the future. Common-pool theories focus on the fact that many decision makers (e.g. spending ministers) may be involved in formulating budgets, and these decision makers fail to internalise the overall costs of higher spending and debt. This theory suggests a direct link between different types of institutional set-up within government and the extent of deficit bias. Roubini and Sachs (1989) pointed to a tendency for more fragmented government coalitions to run larger budget deficits. This result found support in Fabrizio and Mody (2006), although they also concluded that arrangements that provide checks to these pressures can be effective. A number of studies of US states have found public spending pressures associated with political fragmentation (for example, Besley and Case, 2003). Representative electoral systems are likely to be more subject to common-pool problems than those based on majority rule. Persson and Tabellini (2004) show that majoritarian systems are associated with greater fiscal discipline than are proportional ones. In countries with ideologically dispersed coalitions, Hallerberg et al. (2009) find that multiyear targets increase fiscal discipline. Hallerberg and von Hagen (1999) outline how a strong finance ministry can reduce deficit bias. However, over the last decade, the UK had a period when the finance minister (Gordon Brown) had unprecedented power and imposed fiscal rules, all within a majoritarian system of government. Despite this, the UK was also subject to apparent deficit bias. Common-pool theory suggests how a fiscal council with no formal power might nevertheless reduce deficit bias. The recommendations of a council could strengthen the authority of a finance minister. In more fragmented political systems, the recommendations of a fiscal council could form the basis of contracts between political actors that in effect internalised fiscal discipline. (This is discussed in Section 6.2 in the context of the fiscal councils in Austria, Belgium, and the Netherlands.)

13 Time inconsistency and inflation bias It is legitimate to ask whether deficit bias may be related to inflation bias. If fiscal policy is used as a stabilisation tool, then much of the inflation bias literature is directly applicable. In that literature, governments are often assumed to control output and inflation, and whether this is through monetary or fiscal means is not specified. If fiscal policy can be used to raise output and inflation in the short run, this could lead to deficit bias alongside inflation bias. In Agell et al. (1996), a discretionary equilibrium exists with both inflation and deficit bias, and the government would be better off committing to inflation at target and budget balance. Castellani and Debrun (2005) show that institutional change that reduces inflation bias through monetary policy might encourage inflation bias through fiscal policy with an associated deficit bias. 6 If fiscal rules exist to deal with deficit bias arising from this type of time inconsistency, a fiscal council can act as a guardian of such rules when policy makers have incentives to depart from them. In addition, councils can also signal when countercyclical fiscal action is justified (see section 7.1). This might be particularly important for members of a monetary union, where frequent fiscal action may be required. For a fiscal council to advise on the extent of such action would represent a rather different role to advising on longer-term prospects for government debt Exploiting future generations If the existing electorate does not care sufficiently about future generations, then they may elect governments that exploit future generations (Musgrave, 1988). 7 The exploitation of future generations may be direct or indirect. It is direct if taxes are cut today, and paid for by future generations. It is indirect when additional government debt crowds out capital. Why would delegating fiscal decisions to unelected representatives help avoid this intergenerational transfer? Maskin and Tirole (2004) argue that officials want to leave a legacy. In that sense, they will care about what future generations will think of them. In this sense, a fiscal council could represent future generations. However, to do so effectively it would appear as if such a council would have to have actual power over fiscal decisions. It is not clear why a government would cede power in these circumstances. 6 However, time inconsistency problems need not cause deficit bias in models of optimal debt policy. Leith and Wren-Lewis (2007) show that the time-consistent optimal debt policy can involve a rapid return to a debt target in a model with sticky prices or nominal debt. 7 Even in the standard Ricardian case, the welfare of future generations will still be discounted, which may not be ethically desirable (Stern, 2006).

14 The potential contribution of fiscal councils Our discussion shows there is no shortage of explanations for deficit bias. One should expect that in reality different stories may apply at different times or in different places. This may be important in assessing what contributions fiscal councils can make. We will show below that such bodies differ substantially across countries. In some cases this clearly reflects views about what was important in generating deficit bias at a particular time Advisory or decision-making councils. Evaluating which explanations for deficit bias matter may be important for whether fiscal councils should have decision-making power or only be advisory. As shown in Section 6, all existing fiscal councils are advisory. But it has been suggested that such bodies could go a stage further, and take actual policy decisions. (Debrun et al., 2009 describe such bodies as Fiscal Policy Authorities, and they are also sometimes referred to as Fiscal Policy Committees, with obvious parallels to the delegation of monetary policy.) Whether such a move is desirable may depend on the source of deficit bias. Take, for example, the case where deficit bias involves deliberate exploitation of future generations based on complete information. If all a fiscal council does is to provide information about the extent of the exploitation and advice to the government, it would not change anything. Here there would be a strong argument for delegating decision-making power to an independent council that implicitly represented the welfare of future generations. With other explanations of deficit bias, an advisory role may be sufficient to affect policy, although one would always expect delegation of decision-making power to be more effective. It is common to draw parallels to delegation of monetary policy decisions to independent central banks (see, for example, Calmfors, 2005; Wyplosz, 2005; or Debrun et al., 2009). However, there are two important differences between fiscal and monetary policy here, beyond potential differences in the problem delegation is trying to avoid. First, while there is a general consensus about what the goals for monetary policy should be, there is much less consensus with fiscal policy. As we noted in the previous section, theory at present has very little to say about what constitutes an optimum debt target. Alesina and Tabellini (2007) suggest that widespread consensus about the goals of policy is a prerequisite for the successful delegation of decisions. If such a consensus is lacking for optimal debt policy, then this argues against taking decisions over debt and deficits away from an elected government. 8 8 A similar argument can be used to make a positive case for delegation of evaluation and advice. A fiscal council could play a useful role in both encouraging research on optimal debt policy and in evaluating this

15 13 Second, while there is generally only a single monetary policy instrument, there are many fiscal instruments. Issues over both individual tax policy, and over the overall size of the state, are clearly the provenance of elected governments and could not be taken by a fiscal council. Both arguments suggest a stronger case for fiscal councils with advisory functions than for councils with decision-making authority. The arguments also explain why fiscal councils are more suitable as complements to rules than as substitutes for them (see Wyplosz, 2002; 2005), since a rule determined by the political system gives an advisory council a clear, democratically decided, benchmark against which to judge policy Different types of advisory councils. The perceived cause of deficit bias should have implications for the tasks performed by an advisory fiscal council. The most clear-cut case is if the bias derives from deficiencies in information. If the primary problem is thought to be over-optimism by governments in making fiscal projections, then these forecasts could be delegated to the fiscal council. If the main information problem instead is insufficient understanding of the government s intertemporal budget constraint, i.e. of the future consequences of current deficits, providing fiscal sustainability calculations highlighting these consequences might alleviate the bias. These are two examples where the provision of positive analysis by a council may go a long way. When the root cause of deficit bias is instead impatience on the part of governments, electoral competition or time inconsistency of the inflation bias type, the role of a fiscal council may rather concern the interpretation and implementation of fiscal rules. Then a more normative role providing explicit judgements on the consistency of government policy with the rules might be appropriate. This would serve to increase the reputation cost for governments of violating the rules. If deficit bias is instead caused by common-pool problems, the role of a fiscal council might rather be to promote the co-ordination necessary to make individual agents internalise the effects of policies that benefit them on others. Presumably, this could be done both by providing positive analysis that can serve as a basis for political negotiations and by making normative recommendations influencing such negotiations. As we noted earlier, the fact that fiscal rules may not be sufficient to prevent deficit bias could reflect the difficulty in designing rules that are both simple and optimal. This research. (One of the striking features of delegated monetary policy is how well central banks network in processing academic research.) A delegated body may be preferable to government in this role because an independent body would be better able to take an objective view of research.

16 14 suggests a potential division of labour between a government and a fiscal council. A government can retain the power to establish the fiscal rule. A fiscal council can then either advise the government and electorate on whether the rule is being adhered to (if the rule is complex), or suggest when it is legitimate to depart from that rule (when the rule is simple), thereby helping to avoid distortions that simple targets might otherwise create. 9 A fiscal council might also advise on how rules could be improved The long-run viability of fiscal councils. Above we noted that under some explanations for deficit bias (e.g. exploitation of future generations) it was difficult to see why a government would establish a fiscal council. A related and important question concerns the long-run viability of a fiscal council. For the same reason that a government has an incentive to renege on a fiscal rule, it has an incentive not to heed the advice of a fiscal council or even to dismantle it if its critique of government policy becomes too embarrassing. The issue is in principle similar to the problem with central bank independence raised by McCallum (1995), which is that independence simply moves the time inconsistency problem to another level. It is easy to see how this problem could arise.. Fiscal councils are sometimes proposed by opposition parties as part of a critique of incumbent governments. As can be the case with a fiscal rule, the prospective government may also wish to be seen to constrain its future actions. Once elected, and with a council established, the constraint begins to bind, which creates incentives to disregard the council s advice, to interfere with its remit and possibly even to shut it down. The position of the council may become even more precarious if the party that established it is no longer in power. Conflict between a government and a fiscal council is not inevitable: the fiscal council may help validate optimal departures from simple rules, or establish that a government was not unduly impatient. However, the experience of the newly established fiscal councils in Hungary and Sweden discussed in Sections 6.2 and show that there are serious dangers here. In principle, there are two ways to handle the political fragility of a fiscal council. One way is for the council to build up a reputation for impartial and competent analysis, so that the political cost of interfering with its activities outweighs the political gains. This is, however, likely to take time, since it presupposes that the council gets well-known among the general 9 Krogstrup and Wyplosz (2010) examine how aggregate budget targets may allow productive government spending to be squeezed out in favour of transfers to specific interest groups. They suggest a fiscal council could have a role in allowing precommitment at the national level to desirable productive government spending, in the context of externally imposed deficit limits.

17 15 public, and may therefore not be enough for protecting newly established councils. The other way is to set up formal rules protecting the independence of the council. These issues are discussed further in Sections 6.2 and Issues when setting up a fiscal council in practice The preceding section has analysed theoretically how independent fiscal institutions could strengthen fiscal discipline. Setting up such institutions, however, raises a number of practical issues. We focus on fiscal councils without decision-making power, as these are the only ones that have been established so far The remit of a fiscal council A first question is how exactly to define the remit of a fiscal council. Our previous analysis suggests the following possible tasks: Ex-post evaluation of whether fiscal policy has met its targets in the past. Ex-ante evaluation of whether fiscal policy is likely to meet its targets in the future. Analysis of the long-run sustainability and optimality of fiscal policy. Analysis of fiscal transparency. Costing of individual government policy initiatives. Macroeconomic forecasting. Normative recommendations on fiscal policy. The first four activities can be seen as core activities of a fiscal watchdog. Fiscal targets are usually conditioned on cyclical developments, which means that there may be different interpretations of whether or not the targets have been met. This increases the scope for political manipulation. It gives a council an important role in verifying past fiscal behaviour. The risk of later being criticised by an official watchdog should strengthen the ex-ante incentives for governments to exercise fiscal discipline. These incentives are even stronger if a council also engages in ex-ante evaluation of whether fiscal policy is likely to meet its objectives in the future. Long-run fiscal analysis should also be a core activity of a fiscal watchdog, since insufficient consideration of future consequences forms the core of the deficit bias problem. The European Commission and several EU governments produce regular sustainability calculations, but it is well-known that these are sensitive to small changes in assumptions

18 16 (see, for example, Swedish Fiscal Policy Council, 2009; 2010). There is an obvious temptation for governments to make benign assumptions. A fiscal council can therefore exert influence either by making its own calculations or by careful monitoring of government calculations. A key issue concerns the relationship between medium-term fiscal targets and long-term objectives. Medium-term targets can be seen as intermediate goals designed to achieve more fundamental, higher-level objectives. The latter could refer to social efficiency (giving an argument for tax smoothing), precautionary savings to deal with future contingencies or intergenerational equity (see, for example, Auerbach, 2008). A minimum assignment of a fiscal watchdog is only to evaluate the consistency of fiscal policy with the medium-term, intermediate targets. A more ambitious task is also to evaluate the consistency of the intermediate targets with the higher-level objectives. There is, however, a potential conflict between the two tasks. Should a fiscal council act both as a policeman for the intermediate targets set by the government and as a judge of the appropriateness of these targets? On one hand, the latter task could compromise the credibility of the council when policing the adherence to the intermediate targets if it is critical of them. On the other hand, given its expertise, a fiscal council is particularly well placed to analyse the relationship between higher-level objectives and medium-term targets. Another contentious issue is whether a fiscal council should do macroeconomic forecasting. An obvious argument in favour is that overoptimistic government forecasts have often been used to mask profligate fiscal policy (Jonung and Larch, 2006). But forecasting increases the resource requirements for a council considerably. Forecasting may also crowd out other council activities. Moreover, forecasts are wrong most of the time sometimes very wrong so engaging in this activity could weaken the council s credibility and make it harder to fulfil other tasks (Wren-Lewis, 2010; Calmfors 2010b). An alternative is that the council only monitors the government s forecasts. Should a fiscal council undertake only positive analysis or should it also do normative analysis? The minimum positive analysis is to set out the consequences of the government's policy only. A more ambitious approach is to spell out the consequences of alternative policies as well. Finally, a council could give outright policy recommendations. These issues involve difficult trade-offs. On one hand, normative recommendations could compromise the positive analyses. On the other hand, consumers of the council s reports may find it difficult to work out how a strictly positive analysis should be transformed into policy conclusions, thus lessening the impact of the council s analysis on actual policy (Debrun et al., 2009).

19 Broader tasks for a fiscal council? Could the remit of a fiscal council be broadened to other areas as well? Two possible candidates are employment and growth as these are also key macroeconomic objectives. Again there are arguments both in favour and against. A broader remit has the obvious drawback that the resources of the council are spread more thinly. Another risk is that the council s analysis of more concrete, short-run issues such as youth unemployment, specific tax proposals etc. could receive more public attention than less tangible fiscal sustainability issues. If so, the aim of strengthening the incentives for fiscal discipline may be achieved to a lesser degree with a broader remit. There are also arguments in favour of broader tasks. One has to do with the strong interaction between fiscal sustainability and employment. Assumptions on future employment developments can be key to the results of fiscal sustainability calculations (Swedish Fiscal Policy Council, 2009). Deficit bias can also be seen as a manifestation of the more general problem of too little attention being paid to analytical input in the political process at large (Calmfors, 2009). In trying to increase the impact of such analysis, a fiscal council with a solid reputation might be more effective than a host of different evaluating agencies in various areas. At least in a small country, it might also be difficult to fill a multitude of independent evaluating institutions with sufficiently competent staff (Calmfors, 2010b) Independence There is a consensus in the academic discussion of fiscal councils on the need for independence from the political system. This follows from the presumption that deficit bias arises from distortions in the political system that a council should be designed to counteract. Research on central banks has specified a number of ways through which independence for an economic policy institution can be achieved. These include: Appointment procedures that seek to guarantee professionalism and not political preferences as the ground for appointment. Long and non-renewable periods of office for the institution s decision-making body. Restrictions on the government s freedom to fire the members of the institution s decision-making body. Outright prohibitions both against the government interfering with the institution s ongoing work, and against the institution taking instructions from the government.

20 18 A key factor for independence from the political system is budgetary independence. For central banks this is almost automatically granted since they have access to the seignorage gains. A fiscal council should have a long-term budget, removing a temptation for governments to try and influence the council s work through the size of budget appropriations. Independence is also jeopardised if the council is not provided with sufficient resources but has instead to draw on the resources of the ministry of finance. Another crucial factor for independence is accountability. This may sound paradoxical, but a council which is not held accountable in the short run may risk its independence in the long run. The reason is that a council doing its job is likely from time to time to get into conflict with the government which may then want to restrict its independence or reformulate its tasks. The best protection against this would be regular evaluations of the quality of the council's work. Such evaluations could be peer evaluations done by councils in other countries (or by a more formalised international network of councils) or by international organisations such as the IMF and the OECD. Establishing international standards for fiscal councils could be another way of bolstering their independence. In fact, EU finance ministers have already agreed in the van Rompuy Task Force (2010) to formulate (non-binding) recommendations on the set-up of national fiscal councils. This could be a way of raising the political cost for governments of infringing on the independence of fiscal councils. Within the EU, another way of safeguarding the position of national councils could be to give them a formal role in economic governance.this could be done, for example, through agreements with member states having fiscal councils that the latter should provide the Ecofin Council with evaluations of national stability or convergence programmes submitted to the EU. The choice of principal for a fiscal council can also influence its independence. The council could formally be an agency under the government, but it could also be an agency under the parliament. The latter arrangement is a way of signalling independence from the government. But the arrangement could cut two ways. On one hand, it makes it harder for the government to interfere. On the other hand, the political cost of doing so might be smaller for less well-known parliamentarians than for government ministers. The composition of a fiscal council could be important for its independence. There are at least four possible pools of people from which council members could be recruited: (i) academic researchers; (ii) public-finance experts from various parts of government administration; (iii) analysts in the financial sector; and (iv) ex-politicians.

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